Casino king Sheldon Adelson spent $100 million trying to put a Republican in the White House in 2012 and is already shaping up to be a power player in 2016. In February 2015, he signed on to support the candidacy of Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina. Going against his image as a right-wing ideologue, Adelson penned an op-ed in The New York Times with Bill Gates and Warren Buffett

in July 2014 advocating for compromise on immigration reform. "We believe it borders on insanity to train intelligent and motivated people in our universities - often subsidizing their education - and then deport them when they graduate," the billionaires wrote. Adelson's day job is running Las Vegas Sands, the largest gaming company in the world. Its biggest market is Macau, on the edge of China, which boomed for years but struggled in 2014. The first month of 2015, Adelson named himself CEO of Las Vegas Sands China, which has casinos in Macau. He grew up sleeping on the floor of a Boston tenement house and bought his first newspaper corner with a $200 loan from his uncle when he was 12. Over the succeeding decades, he built a fortune running vending machines, selling newspaper ads, helping small businesses go public, developing condos and hosting trade shows. In 1995, Adelson sold his tech conference Comdex for $862 million and then spent $1.5 billion building the Venetian hotel and casino in Las Vegas. His fortune fell more than 85% to $3.4 billion in the 2009 recession from 2008; soon after he reaped billions from his big bet on Macau.

Reform conservatives don’t just care about specific policies, because they have a wide-ranging agenda. Spross thinks policies like an expanded EITC or child tax credit could be “sellable” within the Democratic Party. Maybe, maybe not. How about

Readers regularly ask what can go wrong but almost never what could positively surprise. The elephant in our world’s living room is, simply, technology. Not only is Moore’s Law, the North Star of semiconductors, vibrant and likely intact for fully another decade, but silently other technologies are bulging, too.

The MGM Macau made Pansy Ho a billionaire many times over, thanks to a deal she capitalized on more than ten years ago when U.S. casino operators were maneuvering for a foothold in a newly opened market.

But these days she doesn’t have a management role at MGM China, the casino resort’s parent company. Instead, she has long earned her read »

Happy New Year to all. It’s a particularly happy new year for Macau casino owners, undoubtedly delighted to put 2014 behind them. By all indicators, Macau’s annual gaming revenue fell for the first time since new operators joined Stanley Ho’s former monopoly in the market a decade ago, though it will remain the world’s top gaming destination by read »

The S&P 500 returned approximately 7.7% in from January 2 to December 18, 2014. But no one makes The Forbes 400 by being average. We can get a glimpse of which American billionaires beat the market and which ones were beaten by it — and by how much – by reviewing the change in the value of their public holdings over the same period. read »

For the world’s richest people, money comes and goes constantly — it’s not uncommon for the wealthiest individuals to make or lose tens or even hundreds of millions every day. The S&P 500 returned approximately 7.7% in from January 2 to December 18, 2014. But no one makes The Forbes 400 by being average. We can get a glimpse of which read »

Earlier this year David Baazov walked into the Manhattan offices of the Blackstone Group, the world’s biggest private equity firm, with an outrageous offer. At 33 Baazov was the little-known chief of Amaya, an obscure Montreal company with a loose handful of assets in the gambling industry. But he had big plans. With the backing of Blackstone’s read »

Asia has a record number of billionaires on the new Forbes Billionaires List out yesterday, a sign of great prosperity. Yet many pillars of the Asian business landscape are now in their twilight years. Among them, Asia’s richest man, Li Ka-shing, is 86.

What are the risks involved when great wealth and power pass from one generation to read »

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was threatened by supporters of the Islamic State, raising the issue of how social media can be used both to liberate the oppressed and to spread fear and messages of terror. read »